Elizabeth Gaskell

The novelist Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell is now best known as the author of Cranford and North and South and the biographer of her friend Charlotte Brontë. Her greatest books were written in reaction to the industrialization of Manchester, where she lived for much of her life. ‘I had always felt a deep sympathy with the care-worn men, who looked as if doomed to struggle through their lives in strange alternations between work and want,’ she wrote in the preface to Mary Barton.

She was born in Chelsea, London, on 29 September 1810, the daughter of two devout Unitarians, William Stevenson, and Elizabeth Holland. After her mother died in 1811, she was brought up by her aunt, Hannah Lumb, in Knutsford, Cheshire. In 1832, she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister and later a professor of history, literature, and logic; both were interested in new scientific ideas and literature. The couple settled in Manchester.